What Are We Actually Worth? The Great Australian Salary Transparency Debate

There’s a thread doing the rounds on Reddit at the moment where a digital marketer — four and a half years out of uni, working at a decent-sized company — asked a pretty simple question: how much are other marketers earning? They mentioned they’d previously been “roasted” for their $85k salary and wanted some honest benchmarks.

What followed was exactly the kind of chaotic, occasionally hilarious, and surprisingly earnest salary discussion the internet does best.

A few people played the classic Reddit game of fictional wealth accumulation — private jets, Koenigseggs, billions in super — which honestly made me laugh out loud. But strip away the jokes and some genuinely useful, honest conversation emerged underneath. And it got me thinking about something that goes well beyond marketing salaries.

The responses were all over the place, which probably reflects reality more than any salary survey does. Some people with nearly a decade of experience were sitting at $80-85k. Others with similar time in the game had jumped to $150k+ by moving industries or going in-house at tech companies. One person had done everything right on paper — MBA, international experience, finance background, psychology degree — and was pulling $65k at a major global agency. That one stung a bit to read.

What really caught my attention though was the back-and-forth about whether $85k is actually good or not. One person broke it down quite methodically: after tax and HECS, you’re looking at roughly $2,400 a fortnight. If rent is $500-600 a week, you’ve still got money left over for groceries, bills, and the basics. Someone else pushed back hard, arguing that living without travel, savings, or any real discretionary spending isn’t living — it’s coping.

Honestly? They’re both right, and that’s the uncomfortable part.

There’s a version of $85k that’s perfectly comfortable — no kids, maybe a partner with income, modest tastes, no HECS debt dragging you down. I get that. But there’s also a version where you’re a sole marketer at a small company, doing the work of three people, watching your responsibilities pile up while salary reviews get quietly shelved, and thinking what is even happening here. Several people in that thread were living that second version, and the burnout in their words was palpable.

That pattern — small company, sole marketer, scope creep until you’re coordinating events and doing graphic design and running Google Ads and somehow also now handling the website — is genuinely exploitative, even if it doesn’t look dramatic from the outside. It’s the kind of thing that happens gradually, and by the time you notice, you’re drowning. A couple of people in the thread described deliberately slowing down while quietly job hunting, which honestly seems like a completely rational response.

The broader thing this touches on is wage transparency, which we’re still pretty weird about in Australia. There’s a cultural awkwardness around talking about money that I think genuinely hurts workers more than employers. When people don’t share what they earn, it’s much easier for companies to lowball new hires or quietly let salaries stagnate. The fact that a thread like this — just honest people comparing notes — generates hundreds of comments suggests there’s a real hunger for this information.

One comment that stuck with me was someone pointing out that $85k is “barely below the median full-time salary” and that you can easily live off it, especially if the work is chill. And look, that’s technically true. But “median” in 2025, with Melbourne rents where they are and grocery bills what they are, isn’t the comfort it used to be. Median just means half of us are below it. That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement.

The workers who seem to be doing best in these conversations are the ones who treated salary transparency as a tool — who researched what their skills were worth in different industries, who moved from agencies to in-house roles, or who specifically targeted sectors known to pay better. One person in search marketing hit $165k after 16 years by doing exactly that. It’s not luck; it’s information-gathering and strategic movement.

Which is maybe the most useful takeaway from all of this. Know your market. Share information with your peers. Don’t stay somewhere that’s quietly tripling your workload without a corresponding conversation about pay. And don’t let anyone make you feel embarrassed for asking what you’re worth.

The person who started the thread ended with a small edit: “it’s not you, it’s the market.” That’s kind, and probably true. But the market doesn’t fix itself — it responds to people who push back on it.